Shakespeare

It is interesting, however, that in his previous plays Shakespeare had used the language and terminology of what might be called folk medicine, with allusions to wormwood and ratsbane, syrup and balsam, but from the time of his friendship with his son-in-law he introduced a more exotic range of medicines such as hebenon and coloquintida, mallow and mandragora. In All’s Well That Ends Well writes of the fistula and alludes to Galen and Paracelsus; in Pericles the doctor, Cerimon, revives Thaisa with “the blest infusions that dwels in Vegetiues, in Mettals, Stones”(1239-40). It is hard to escape the conclusion that his interest in such matters was quickened by his son-in-law’s successful remedies. When in Troilus and Cressida Thersites recites a list of maladies, including cold palsies and sciatica, he might have been reading from Dr. Hall’s case-book.

There is also proof in this case-book that Hall as by no means an extreme Puritan. He successfully treated a Catholic priest and noted that “beyond all expectation the Catholicke was cured,” adding in Latin “Deo gratias.” We may imagine him to have been a moderate Puritan, married to a recusant and therefore content to overlook religious differences.

There were other births and deaths in the immediate Shakespeare family. The register of St. Leonard’s Shoreditch records the birth, on 12 July 1607, of “Edward Shakesbye, the sonne of Edward Shakesbye, was baptised the same day – morefilds.” The fact that he was baptised on the same day as his birth suggests that there was some urgency about the matter, and indeed a month later the baby died. On 12 August he was buried in St. Giles Cripplegate, where the register duly notes “Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere, Playenbase-borne.” The infant was the son of Shakespeare’s younger brother. The name “Edward” in the church registers is a transcription error for “Edmund,” and is a common enough confusion in documents of the period; the mistake was prompted by the unfortunate child’s own name.

So we can deduce that Edmund Shakespeare had travelled to London and had taken up the profession of “Player,” imitating the career of his famous brother. Whether he had taken up the profession on his brother’s advice, or whether he had simply followed his example, is not known. The fact that his son was baptised in Shoreditch and buried in Cripplegate must mean that Edmund was living in the northern suburbs, and that he was probably playing at the Curtain Theatre. He was living very close to Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street, in fact, and it is even possible that he shared them with him. There is no official record of his marriage, so he had also sired a bastard son. This was a not uncommon phenomenon in early seventeenth-century London but it does suggest that Edmund Shakespeare, now in his mid-twenties, was living a somewhat irregular existence as a player.

There are other domestic events to record. On 14 October 1607, in the parish church of Stratford, the son of Richard Tyler was baptised as “William”; it is possible that William Shakespeare was his godfather. Tyler, two years younger than Shakespeare, was a friend and neighbour of the dramatist. He was also no doubt at school with him. He was bequeathed a ring in the first draft of Shakespeare’s will. Richard Tyler was a prosperous yeoman and gentleman, living in Sheep Street, who had held civic office and had been elected as churchwarden. In an official document he is described as “a man of honest Conversacion amp; quiet amp; peacable Carryage amongst his neighbours amp; towards all people.” 2Very little else is known about Tyler, but he may stand as representative of Shakespeare’s Stratford acquaintances. They were generally prosperous, some of them being tradesmen and some of them being, like Tyler, “gentlemen.” They were “honest” and “quiet” and “peacable,” very much the model of the English townsman of this period. And Shakespeare remained on affectionate terms with them all his life. It is hard not to suspect that they were comfortable and welcome company after the vivid and more excitable ambience of London. Shakespeare could relax with them, converse with them, drink with them, without the constant press of theatrical business. Four days after the baptism of little William Tyler in the parish church, Shakespeare’s nephew, Richard Hathaway, baker, was married at the same altar. If the laws of family life applied to the Shakespeares, then the dramatist would have been present for that occasion also.

These rituals were taking place in the immediate aftermath of great local disturbance. The “Midlands Rising” was punctuated by savage enclosure riots directed against the larger landowners. The problems were particularly acute in the Forest of Arden where the enclosers had “turn’d so much of woodland into tillage … that they produce corn to furnish other counties.” The ironworks in the region had also “destroyed prodigious quantities of wood,” 3and the old commons had been transformed into privately owned pasturage. No one denied that the land was the property of the landowner; the rioters were protesting against the overthrow of centuries of traditional usage. There was also anger and dismay at continuing food shortages, a dearth which in the popular mind was associated with the pace of enclosures.

The rising began on the eve of May Day and quickly spread throughout the Midland counties until it became a summer of insurrection. The king issued a royal proclamation deploring the fact that “many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.” 4The rebellion was only halted after savagely repressive measures by the authorities; the military killed scores of protesters, and many of those captured were hanged, drawn and quartered. The problems were, almost literally, on Shakespeare’s doorstep and they entered at least one of his subsequent dramas.

In the winter season of this year, stretching from December 1607 to February 1608, the King’s Men staged thirteen plays at the court for the benefit of the royal family. The names of these plays have not been recorded, but it is a fair assumption that one of them was the drama entitled The Tragedie of Antony and Cleopatra . In Samuel Daniel’s verse drama Cleopatra , reissued in this year, there is a detailed and expressive description of the dying Antony being hoisted onto Cleopatra’s “monument.” This had not appeared in the earlier version of Daniel’s play, printed in 1594, and suggests that Daniel had witnessed a performance of Shakespeare’s scene in which, according to the stage-directions, “They heaue Antony aloft to Cleopatra.” It has all the marks of a visual, rather than a verbal, memory. Since the theatres were closed from July onwards by reason of the plague, the likelihood must be that Daniel saw the play at the Globe in the late spring or early summer of 1607. It was restaged that Christmas for the benefit of the sovereign.

It is possible, however, that the audiences of the time remained unmoved by Antony and Cleopatra . With the exception of the allusion by Samuel Daniel, there is no recorded comment on its production. It was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime – and nor indeed was that other Roman drama, Coriolanus . If they had not been included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, there would be no surviving text.

For Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch and from Horace, from Montaigne and from Pliny. It says something about the effect of the theatre and the permanence of theatrical memory that this doomed love between Antony and Cleopatra, together with the assassination of Julius Caesar, have become the two most famous episodes of Roman history. With the magniloquent verse of Antony and Cleopatra , in particular, Shakespeare has reinvented the last years of republican Rome. The language of passion and aspiration dominates this play. It valorises everything, with the billowing rhetoric of the Egyptians contrasted with the high Roman rhetoric of time and duty. It is the oration conceived as poem. By some unerring insight, too, he has divined the essential characteristics of the protagonists. Octavius Caesar here bears all the incipient greatness and ruthlessness of the ruler who would become Augustus, the first emperor in Roman history.